with somewhat of the
same silent reverence. But after that pause Mr. Lenox remarked that he
never understood that comparison. What was it about an eagle's youth?

"Why," said Lois, "an eagle never grows old!"

"Is that it! But I wish you would go on a little further, Miss Lothrop.
You spoke of hymn-writers having a different standpoint, and of their
words as more cheerful than the utterances of other poets. Do you know,
I had never thought other poets were not cheerful, until now; and I
certainly never got the notion that hymns were an enlivening sort of
literature. I thought they dealt with the shadowy side of life almost
exclusively."

"Well--yes, perhaps they do," said Lois; "but they go kindling beacons
everywhere to light it up; and it is the beacons you see, and not the
darkness. Now the secular poets turn that about. They deal with the
brightest things they can find; but, to change the figure, they cannot
keep the minor chord out of their music."

Mr. and Mrs. Lenox looked at each other.

"Do you mean to say," said the latter, "that the hymn-writers do not
use the minor key? They write in it, or they sing in it, more properly,
altogether!"

"Yes," said Lois, into whose cheeks a slight colour was mounting; "yes,
perhaps; but it is with the blast of the trumpet and the clash of the
cymbals of triumph. There may be the confession of pain, but the cry of
victory is there too!"

"Victory--over what?" said Mrs. Lenox rather scornfully,

"Over pain, for one thing," said Lois; "and over loss, and weariness,
and disappointment."

"You will have to confirm your words by examples again, Lois," said
Mrs. Barclay. "We do not all know hymn literature as well as you do."

"I never saw anything of all that in hymns," said Mrs. Lenox. "They
always sound a little, to me, like dirges."

Lois hesitated. The cart was plodding along through the smooth lanes at
the rate of less than a mile an hour, the oxen swaying from side to
side with their slow, patient steps. The level country around lay
sleepily still under the hot afternoon sun; it was rarely that any
human stir was to be seen, save only the ox driver walking beside the
cart. He walked beside the _cart_, not the oxen; evidently lending a
curious ear to what was spoken in the company; on which account also
the progress of the vehicle was a little less lively than it might have
been.

"My Cynthy's writ a lot o' hymns," he remarked just here. "I never
heerd no trum